Data entry operations in an application may be time consuming. Many software applications may have a data entry user interface (UI) for creating a new record such as details of a person, product and service. A part of the data entered may often be same as the data entered previously. Consider a UI in an application which creates a record of an employee having details such as name of the employee, employee identification number, name of a team the employee may be working in, and name of a manager of the team. For example, when records for a number of employees working in the team have to be created, the records may be created one by one. A part of the data such as name of the team and name of the manager may be same for all employees working in the team. Though the name of the team and name of the manager may be same they may have to be entered for all the employees working in the team. This may be inefficient as the data may be entered for all the employees manually even though they are same. Thus, entering the same data repetitively may result in an unproductive usage of time and effort.
Also, often times when a user makes a data entry in few fields of the record in the UI, the data that must be entered in the rest of the fields of the record may be obvious to the user. But, the application may not know the data to be entered. Thus, the user may have to spend time and effort in entering the data though the data to be entered is obvious. This may result in unproductive usage of time and effort. For example, an application may have a UI to create a record of an employee working in an organization. The record may have details such as employee identification number, employee name, date of birth and age. After creating the record of an employee, the record may be stored in a database. The application may have another UI for creating a list of employees participating in a sports competition. The record may have details such as employee identification number, employee name, date of birth, age, and sports event. Once the sports event and the employee identification number is entered in the UI, the rest of the details such as employee name, date of birth and age of the employee are obvious as the application may already have the employee name, date of birth and age of the employee corresponding to the employee identification number entered, in the database. But the application may not know that the employee name, date of birth and age of the employee is obvious and may not fill the values for them automatically. Thus, the user may have to enter the employee name, date of birth and age again which may result in an unproductive usage of time and effort.